I've written about Afghanistan quite a bit here. My first experience to the country in 1994, changed my life and propelled me to want to continue pursuing journalism as a career. This was a country in which the U.S. was deeply involved throughout the 1980's but the year I visited, no one was talking about it, no one was reporting there, no news was coming out of it. A civil war had been raging there for five years and our U.S. State Department source told us that it was the one country that was in danger of just disappearing off the map as a result of constant war. Well, we certainly know that that did not happen. Afghanistan is very much still on the map and just the other day 9 U.S. servicemen were killed there, the most since 1995.
That trip in 94' was surreal for me. I was a kid from northern California who could barely identify Afghanistan on a map at the time. Frankly, few adults in my world could do so either. It was a place that time and the world seemed to have forgotten. Thousands of people were living in refugee camps, no walls stood without bullet holes and giant craters and all the young boys were armed with weapons that were larger than they were. All I could think about while there was: what's going to happen to these heavily armed young boys in ten years? With no education and growing up exposed to constant war for 15 years, how could these boys possibly grow up to do anything but become warlords, that's all they knew. The scene continues to haunt me to this day.
Not to mention the fact that many of the weapons these boys were harboring, were likely paid for by the United States. What was our responsibility in there? Afterall, we did pump over a billion dollars worth of the highest tech weaponry into Afghanistan in the late 1980's when Afghanistan was engaged in a proxy war against our Cold War adversary, the Soviet Union. During the decade long Soviet/Afghan war, Islamic fighters from all over the war--including Osama Bin Laden--came to train in Afghanistan. In 1989, when the Afghans defeated the Soviets, the U.S. pulled out and left this tiny country that had known nothing but a decade of war with weapons that would be later turned on us.
It was clear to me in 1994, that we would hear about Afghanistan in the future. That this country was not going to "disappear off the map," as I was told, but rather it could very possibly become a haven for terroristic activities. September 11, was the biggest and most catastrophic example of something that was hatched in Afghanistan. When we decided to commit billions to another war in a country that we knew had nothing to do with September 11, I was utterly confused. Now that our resources are over stretched and we've spent nearly a trillion dollars in Iraq, Afghanistan is as dangerous as ever. It's a country that has been ravaged by war for nearly thirty years now. Peace is a concept far more difficult to comprehend than war and tragically, most people there have never known it.
